Welcome to the rile* book podcast, an archival space for the readings and conversations we host at our space in Brussels. For this episode we have the pleasure of sharing the recording of a reading by US based poet Farid Matuk reading from his forthcoming collection Moon Mirrored Indivisible. It was followed by a conversation with Brussel based writer Filip Jakab. The event took place on June 15th 2024.

The poems explore the aesthetic perversions of syntax and rhyme to search for yet unrealized perversions and purities amidst national, sexual, and ancestral orthodoxies.

Enjoy !

This episode was recorded and edited by Ros Del Olmo. You can check out past and upcoming events via our website www.rile.space

About Farid Matuk
A queer writer of Syrian and Peruvian heritage, Farid Matuk has lived in the U.S. since the age of six first as an undocumented person, then a “legal” resident, and now as a “naturalized" citizen. He is the author of the poetry collections This Isa Nice Neighborhood and The Real Horse, and of several chapbooks including My Daughter La Chola (Ahsahta). His work has been anthologized in The Best American Experimental Poetry, in Angels of the Americlypse: An Anthology of New Latin@ Writing, and the Library of America’s Latino Poetry: A New Anthology, among others. Matuk's poems can be found in journals including The Nation, The Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Poetry, Bomb Magazine, Lana Turner Journal, and The Paris Review. Matuk's book arts project, Redolent, made in collaboration with visual artist Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez, was awarded the 2023 Anna Rabinowitz Prize by the Poetry Society of America. His work has been supported by The Headlands Center for the Arts, by a Holloway Professorship in Poetry & Poetics at UC Berkeley, and by a 2024 United States Artists Fellowship. Matuk’s translations of Peruvian poet Tilsa Otta are forthcoming from Graywolf Press and his third collection, Moon Mirrored Indivisible, will be published by University of Chicago Press in 2025.

About Filip Jakab
Filip Jakab writes and edits columns, fiction, essays, and celebrity profiles. He is a contributing editor at L.A.-based FLAUNT magazine. He read WHO WANTS IT HOW, his three-month gossip~culture~sex column installment at Spare Wheel, Brussels. IRL column readings are published via SaltOverGold, his Substack claiming: “…imbued with the depth of bleakness, half-journalistic, half-fictional, the column appears as a possibility to reflect on what people in Brussels gossip, but barely anyone has the guts to say it out loud.” He previously read his fiction at CELADOR, Brussels and David Horvitz Garden, Los Angeles. His forthcoming fiction will appear in October 2024 at SPZ gallery, Prague. He is currently writing the draft of his first novel and develops ideas by typing in notes on his phone during morning runs. He was born in Košice, Slovakia, and is based in Brussels, Belgium.